David Williams Photo: Precursor

David Williams, founder of Care3

Care3 is a healthcare tech solution inspired by the realization that the most vulnerable members of our society lack equal access to healthcare and receive inadequate quality of care in their homes and communities. Care3 is built to fix these unacceptable and unnecessary inequities.

Precursor Ventures has Care3 listed in its portfolio of investments.

The Care3 model of community, care and collaboration aims to keep patients living independently and comfortably in their homes. Founded by three former Aetna executives, Care3 supports care programs that require collaboration between interdisciplinary care providers, patients, and family caregivers on the same platform. Its goal is to improve outcomes and reduce hospital readmissions for underserved populations including people of color, the disabled and seniors.

In April 2017, Care3 was recognized as one of the most promising healthcare communication solution providers by Healthcare Tech Outlook. This ranking identified Care3 as a leading developer of digital health technology:

“Care3’s selection was based on creating a truly collaborative platform for providers and families to deliver consistent high quality care for underserved populations,” said Alex D’ Souza, managing editor of Healthcare Tech Outlook. “Care3 is addressing a major problem that many of our readers have been urgently trying to solve.”

Frederick Hutson and Alfonso Brooks, co-founders of Pigeonly

Pigeonly collects and organizes data on inmates, transforming it into usable information that can benefit inmates and society. Its inmate population database, Haystac, allows users to find an inmate in county, state, and federal correctional systems. Pigeonly says it has created a solution for communities that need solutions the most:

“As a small team of creative rebels we have a collaborative culture built on hacking ideas, code, and business models specifically for underserved communities.”

Pigeonly products connect inmates with their families through low-cost phone and mail services.

The business venture began after co-founder Frederick Hutson served a four-year sentence for mailing marijuana via FedEx, UPS, and DHL, according to The Source. He was busted at his Las Vegas mail store.

While he was still in a halfway house in 2013, Hutson and his co-founder Alfonzo Brooks launched a version of Pigeonly. They quickly got 2,000 customers by directly mailing inmates.

Pigeonly centralizes multiple state-level databases making it easy to find where an inmate is in the system. Sub-brand Fotopigeon sends digital prints to inmates and Telepigeon lowers phone call rates through VoIP. Pigeonly brought in $1 million revenue in its first year following $2 million in seed financing from Silicon Valley investors inlcuding Erik Moore at Base Ventures and Kapor Capital.

Key to this was getting accepted to NewMe, a Silicon Valley-based accelerator for underrepresented minorities. It was the only accelerator that accepted Hutson, The Source reported:

“A lot of times a thing that can be perceived as a weakness actually turn into the greatest strength and for me it was that. It actually became the reason people invested…because I’d been there, and I know and understand this market better than anybody else,” Hutson said.

Andrew D’Souza. Photo: Precursor

Andrew D’Souza, co-founder of Clearbanc

Andrew D’Souza is co-founder and CEO of Clearbanc, a banking services startup that helps self-employed Americans such as freelancers and entrepreneurs get paid faster. He started investing before he was a teenager and worked in several tech roles before co-founding Clearbanc. These include being COO of educational software company Top Hat and president of Nymi, a biometrics authentication software and tech company.

“I never really wanted a lot of things,” D’Souza said in an interview in The Globe. “I always found that owning stuff feels like more of a burden to me than brings me joy. Even now, I rent furnished apartments; I don’t own a car. It allows me to keep my lifestyle flexible and keep a lot of cash flow going through. That allows me to take most of my earnings, especially early in my career, and put them in index funds … and to invest in startups.”

D’Souza is in the Precursor Ventures portfolio of investments. He talks here about the things he likes to invest in:

About two-thirds of my investments are in low-cost ETFs (exchange-traded funds) through Wealthsimple and in my own trading account. I’m also a private investor in a handful of technology companies such as Wealthsimple, Tulip Retail, Top Hat, Street Contxt and of course my own company, Clearbanc. All of these private investments are high risk, but I know the businesses, I know the founders and the teams intimately and I know I can actually have an impact beyond just providing capital. I can actually help them grow the business and have some kind of impact on the outcomes of the investment.
You have to have a big enough portfolio where, if any of them fail – which happens in startups – you have enough really big wins that you still have positive returns. I have a few companies that have grown 10 times in a couple of years. Those really buoy the returns.

Kellee James. Photo: LinkedIn/Kapor Capital

Kellee James, co-Founder of Mercaris

Mercaris claims to be helping grow organic and non-GMO agriculture in the U.S. It has a market data service providing information on market conditions for organic and non-GMO commodities (think along the lines of Bloomberg data for high-brow corn) and a trading platform that allows buyers and sellers to meet online and trade commodities. The development of sustainable agriculture is at a critical point, according to Mercaris:

While some resources are in place to educate consumers, address public policy, and support scientific research on sustainable agricultural crops, far less emphasis has been placed on the market infrastructure upon which participants, from producers to retailers, depend. Mercaris was formed to address this gap.

Kellee James, co-founder and CEO of Mercaris, has a career journey that spans professional horse riding, a stint as a White House fellow in 2009 and tech startup founder. She talked about why she focuses on GMOs in a Jobbio interview:

The idea was really simple…These are commodities that were produced under special conditions, that in the case of organic, take into account environmental factors. The production is very different and because consumer demand and consumption has also been so different, these markets behave very differently than conventional ones. We decided that no one else was covering these markets in a rigorous way and we should be the first to do it.

James said in a 2016 Fast Company report that everyone struggles with the mandate to make tech more diverse. At Mercaris, she admits she has had trouble hiring candidates of color, not because they’re not out there — she knows they are — but existing networks make it harder and more time-consuming to get diverse candidates in the door:

“Everyone should be working on inclusion and diversity; no one can sit back and say, ‘We’re just fine.”

She has been funded by eBay-founding billionaire Pierre Omidyar. “When Omidyar wrote a check, it built a lot of confidence for subsequent investors, including Freada Kapor Klein and Joanne Wilson. (These names … come up again and again in the small world of VC investment in black female founders,” according to Fast Company.

Garrett Johnson, co-founder of SendHub

SendHub is a business-focused call and messaging solution that offers free and low-cost telecommunication options. These include free phone numbers in any area code accessible on any device and instant analytics with a click. SendHub was acquired by Cameo Global in June 2016.

The company raised $2 million in seed funding from Kapor Capital, among others, including an undisclosed investment from former Florida Governor, Jeb Bush, Tech Crunch reported. Another $3 million was raised in Series A funding, the company announced in 2013. The round also included Kapor.

Garrett Johnson, co-founder of SendHub, was identified as one of Newsmax‘s 25 Most Influential Republicans in Tech. Now executive director and co-founder of the Lincoln Network, he’s considered a leader in building up and organizing right-leaning thinkers in the tech community in an effort to affect public policy with tech solutions.

Johnson served from 2009 to 2011 on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Johnson got the idea for SendHub learning of the challenge teachers in his native Tampa neighborhood had in communicating with parents, according to a 2012 BET report:

As is the case in low-income, African-American communities around the nation, many households don’t have the same access to computers or the internet as they do to text-enabled mobile phones, BET reported.

This was a pervasive problem at the small charter school attended by his nephew, who, like most bright kids, still forgot to turn in assignments or left behind his backpack from time to time. And while teachers could contact parents via text message, that meant sacrificing the privacy of their personal cell phone numbers.

“I promised to try to figure out a way for them to communicate over SMS more efficiently without having to use their phones,” Johnson told BET.”

Brian Brackeen, founder of Kairos

Brian Brackeen is the founder of Kairos, a Miami-based facial recognition company that is working with companies to change the way they interact with their employees, patients, and customers.

Kairos is the only facial biometrics company in the world offering both facial recognition and emotion analysis tools for developers.

“We capture decisive moments in people’s behavior to empower companies with meaningful metrics,” Brackeen said on his LinkedIn page, according to an earlier Moguldom report. “At Kairos, we believe that data as we know it today is just the beginning for business intelligence. Our mission is to radically change how companies understand people.”

“Our diversity is our advantage, Brackeen said in a Kairos blog:

“The Kairos family was founded on the principles of empathy, integrity and freedom – we are a culturally rich team and have a bias for inclusion. And to borrow the words of (Denise Young Smith) vice president of worldwide human resources at Apple:

“Diversity is more than any one gender, race, or ethnicity. It’s richly representative of all people, all backgrounds, and all perspectives. It is the entire human experience.”

Here’s what Mitch Kapor, a partner at Kapor Capital and Kairos investor, said about the face of technology in the U.S.:

“Today the tech industry does not look like America, and that has a significant influence on the types of products and services that get created. When the lived experience of underrepresented communities is omitted from the product development cycle, the usefulness of the technology becomes biased towards one group.”